


The 1920s Were too Delicate to Tell the Truth

by pyromanicofthesea



Category: Nosferatu (1921)
Genre: Ellen is a queen and honestly deserves better, Hutter/Orlok centered, I wrote this and then turned it in, M/M, and my professor loved it, for a grade, in a college level film history class, major spoilers for the movie, though since the thing is damn near 100 years old lol go figure, what even is college, y'all I wrote this for class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 17:56:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18643156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyromanicofthesea/pseuds/pyromanicofthesea
Summary: Everything in Nosferatu (1921) was true, but there was more to the story that film and fade-to-blacks just couldn't portray.





	The 1920s Were too Delicate to Tell the Truth

Count Orlok had a friend in Wisborg, to whom he wrote to from time to time. Their correspondence were not of that which man would approve, as whoever would dare become familiar with a vampire was said to be just as good as a vampire themselves. This created the necessity for a form of code to continue communications unhindered by prying eyes and nosy hands.  
It wasn’t really a code, however. It had been the language Orlok had learned when his master - now long since killed by vampire hunters - had first turned him. A dead language by voice, passed down only in its written form. Knock was a good friend, a very close and loyal companion, and Orlok trusted him with the knowledge of the vampire’s secret language despite never having truly turned the man.  
Well, turned him in the traditional sense.  
Knock was plenty bloodthirsty after the first night he spent with Orlok, but their encounter - and the ones that followed afterwards, as there were nights of a similar time that followed - was not anything as special as that which would change a normal man into a creature of the night. Regardless, Orlok considered Knock to be a special sort of human, even if he did not see the man as a man who would make decent vampire material.  
Or, perhaps the nitty-gritty was that Orlok had been living for hundreds of years, cut off from his master after his death, and that sort of unexpectedly sudden loneliness can wear on one’s mind even after the threat dies out like humanity thought the vampire had. Even after the threat becomes a bedtime story to tell one’s children. Orlok might have neglected to turn Knock out of fear that once his friend became a vampire, Knock’s life was either set to end or the man was to be doomed to an afterlife of loneliness.  
Nevertheless, Knock could read that which Orlok wrote to him. So when he received a letter from the Count that appeared to be written in scratch, pictographs, and ruins, he mulled over its contents as if it were written in plain ol’ German.  
The letter had arrived with the morning post, and Knock finally got to it just as the employed agents were filing in to receive requests for houses and for properties to be sold. Hutter was within that batch, passing through the door as Knock read. Knock laughed, cackling with glee at the words he read, and cutting off that laughter as if it had never occurred just a moment later to continue reading. His master, the man who he would give his life to in an instant, aimed to move from his secluded countryside and was requesting one of his agents. It was an opportunity that wouldn’t come again, for if Knock could convincingly sell him a house in Wisborg, then he and Orlok would be reunited after so long apart. The realization that Wisborg, where Knock had found work, and Transylvania, where Orlok resided in the castle from his early afterlife, was far too long of a distance for Orlok to travel and return by dawn cut Knock deep. Orlok, though he had yet to voice it, was lonesome without Knock’s company in the isolated castle. Wisborg would be a tricky travel for the Count, all things considered, but this was Knock’s chance.  
He tried to think of which of the agents would be charming enough to convince Orlok to make the journey across the water, with his coffin and undoubtedly dirt from homeland somehow, and after some considerable thought, a name came to mind.  
“Herr Hutter!” Hutter perked up from the sign-in records, hoping that Knock was calling him over to give him something to do besides file the paperwork from his previous sale and not to scold him for, well, the sloppiness of the previous sale.  
Hutter walked into the man’s office, and was greeted almost immediately by a request. He didn’t even get a chance to greet the man himself. He could only stand there, dumbfounded by the urgency in Knock’s voice, while the man spoke.  
“Count Orlok, His Grace from Transylvania, wishes to purchase a nice house in our little town,” Knock told him. This was, of course, not entirely the truth, as Orlok hadn’t specified _where_ he was hoping to move to, just that he was intending to move and wanted assistance from one of Knock’s real estate agents. Hutter turned to look at Knock, and Knock turned to look at him, adding for incentive, “you could earn a tidy sum.”  
It was the addition that energized Hutter, as to that he grinned and nearly agreed on the spot. Knock laughed a moment, knowing Hutter would want to know more if he were to travel so far for one job. He knew also that the more information of Orlok he provided, the less likely things would pan out. He chose his words carefully, all but challenging Hutter and the agent’s pride as he spoke.  
“You might have to go to a bit of trouble, a little sweat and maybe, a little blood.” To that, Hutter laughed, and Knock laughed with him, though the two laughs were for two very distinctly different reasons. Hutter’s laugh ended with Knock’s intensity, unnerved by, well, Knock’s intensity. “Go see what you’re in for,” Knock told him as he directed Hutter to the map hanging upon his office wall. With Hutter occupied, Knock looked over the encoded letter once more, reading the valediction of the letter once more. The thought of his master so accessible to him again was enthralling, but he still needed a house to sell. It was the house across the way that presented itself as the answer. “Okay!” he said as he folded the letter to keep eyes off of the odd characters. Hutter rushed over from the map, already planning his route in his mind.  
“Do you have a house in mind?”  
“I do,” Knock replied with a nod, “he wants a very nice, empty house.” He thought back to the castle, and to the qualities of the rooms Orlok frequented most often. He pointed to the abandoned house out the window, and it made Hutter consider reconsidering. “That house, across from yours. Offer him that one!” Before Hutter could get a word in, Knock nudged him and presented his hand. “Off with you! Have a good trip, my young friend, to the land of phantoms.” Though Hutter didn’t much appreciate Knock’s ghastly humour, he took his hand anyway, sharing a laugh with the man as he agreed to the task.

Orlok awaited a response from Knock the moment the letter was sent. There was no joy in remaining in Transylvania. None would dare to make his acquaintance, and so it was time to move on. He trusted Knock to find him a home in a town that knew nothing of the vampire or what took place within the walls of his abode so many years ago. He received his response two weeks later, and made quick preparation to meet the agent Knock was sending. Knock told him very little in his letter, though if Orlok had truly wanted to know everything he would only have to request it. Knock had been obedient to him even before the vampire had so intimately drinken from the man’s neck.  
Despite the way Orlok obsessively removed the cobwebs that littered his home, dusted the floors and walls, trying to polish every inch to make the castle look less like a dungeon and more like a well-loved home, he would still be waiting nearly a month for Hutter’s arrival. That was assuming the man would be traveling on horseback. Were he on foot, Heaven help him.  
The closer Hutter’s estimated arrival date crept, the more Orlok found he couldn’t keep his mind off of the impending meeting. Knock and he had a small conversation over the past few weeks regarding the agent the man had sent to him. The way Knock described the man, it sounded more as if he had found Orlok a suitor rather than a real estate agent. It was amusing, at first, but after a while Orlok worried that Knock had been too careless and had given some part of his secret away. Did this man, this agent, actually know what Orlok really was?  
A few nights before Hutter was estimated to head out, Orlok sent out his hound to walk the grounds as a spy. It wandered through the underbrush to the borders of the inns in the nearby towns, night by night until it located the traveler as per its orders. The townsfolk could hear its howls and grows through the night as it stalked its way through the streets and outskirts. The commonfolk of the town stayed indoors on nights like those, when the werewolf creature was prowling in search of something. They knew the hound belonged to the Count, and they spread rumours that those who enter the castle do not leave as the same men they walked in as.  
“You cannot go further,” innkeepers would say to hasty travelers, of whom Hutter was surely one of. “The werewolf is roaming the forest.”  
Orlok had once explained to a traveling group that alerted him to the creature wandering about his castle’s grounds that the hound would not hurt them, that the hound followed his command, but the group fled at that. It was afterwards that the rumours of his castle had circulated with a stronger frequency. It was difficult to endure, as over the course of a few days he went from often having visitors to having a couple to having none at all. He grew lonely, as one does when none wish to share your company any longer. Shut away from the world, all but locked in his castle. It was no wonder why Orlok wanted so badly to leave Transylvania.  
The werewolf located Hutter and his inn two nights after being set out, as Hutter leaned out the window of the room he was staying in for the night, and turned back to report to its master.  
Orlok, upon receiving the news that the agent was just a day’s carriage away, decided to travel down with a carriage of his own, a coffin of his home soil attached to the undercarriage in case of early arrival, knowing full well that none of the villagers would bring Hutter near his doorstep, or even near his road. The shadow of his carriage, of his very person, swept over the mountainsides as he traveled down and through the forest of white to meet the man who would soon become his welcomed guest.  
He rode throughout the night with an unnatural speed, though still he had to stop as dawn began to arrive. Orlok detached the coffin from underneath the carriage and brought it inside so he could sleep with less risk of discovery, not that villagers traveled this far away from the village grounds anyways.  
By the next nightfall, Orlok’s traveled found their objective. Near forest entrance by the bridge that connected the Count’s land and the land between there and the village, Hutter was found to be walking his way along as if he intended on crossing the pass by foot. It surely had to be Hutter, for Orlok knew no man from the surrounding areas would cross that bridge, let alone go so near to the forest. Would come so close to his lands.  
It was no source of pride. It was merely the cause of his chronic isolation.  
Orlok spurred the two coach horses on, giving little care for if Hutter were to see such supernatural speed. The importance was to fetch the man and return by dawn. Pulling up to Hutter with a deceleration that was equally supernatural as the speed, Orlok looked over at the man Knock had sent to locate prime real estate for him. He noticed that Hutter was not like Knock. Hutter looked healthy in body and mind, young and fair and well-kempt. He was, for all intents and purposes, a rather beautiful man. Then again, any man would be beautiful when you hadn’t seen head or tail of a man in such a great many years as the Count.  
The Count stared Hutter down, and motioned for the man to get into the carriage. Perhaps he had been too mysterious, too heartless, as Hutter looked at him with alarm written clearly on his person. Despite the alarm, Hutter climbed aboard, and Orlok mentally chastised himself for being so inhospitable to his first guest in ever so many years.  
The carriage drove off with the same supernatural speed with which it approached, Hutter’s alarm not subsiding as they traveled back to the castle.

Just outside the castle gate was were Orlok stopped. Knowing, or more accurately, hoping, that Hutter would not have recognized him in his coverings, Orlok pointed out to the gate for Hutter to go. He felt almost remorseful that Hutter looked so unnerved. That look was not so beautiful on such a face. So he drove off, leaving Hutter to the gate entrance and the tufts of grass and bramble that had once been shrubberies of his pride and joy. Maybe in this new home that the real estate agent would find him, he could have shrubberies around his home that would not die from sorrowful neglect so easily.  
The gate was tall, like that of a fortress, and the doors opened as if they were beckoning Hutter inside with the hospitality their groundskeeper had neglected to greet him with. The doors, as they were not truly sentient, could not have known that this act of opening unprompted would cause Hutter to be startled back for a moment as Orlok, on the other side of the castle, scrambled to make himself presentable and to meet his guest with the warm welcome even the unsentient doors knew he regretfully failed to provide.  
Once he felt he looked like the Count he was, Orlok walked out to meet Hutter in the front grounds. Just as he left the shadows, the safety of his isolation, he found himself growing nervous about this meeting. This was supposed to be the beginning of a new start, a second chance for him to make a life for himself somewhere that he was not hailed as a monster. There was much to be nervous about. He wrung his hands together as he continued to walk, eyes searching for Hutter and hoping the man had not gotten lost.  
The weight of the change he was about to pursue was beginning to hang heavy from his shoulders. He paused in his steps, not hearing the door from the right walkway shut. So much could go so wrong so fast. It could be Transylvania all over again. Perhaps it would be better to remain, to stay in the shadows, to hide away from the people who did not want for his kind to exist.  
Hutter’s approaching footsteps brought the Count out of his thoughts. He turned to the sound, meeting eyes with Hutter this time. Hutter removed his cap to the Count, and in return, Orlok took his hat off briefly to reciprocate the greeting. He took this as a sign of good fortune, and spoke once Hutter stepped up beside him.  
“You’ve kept me waiting, too long. It’s almost midnight. The servants are asleep!” He didn’t want Hutter to think he was so rude normally as he was on the carriage. He hoped the mention of servants would throw the man off, assuming Hutter had deemed the interaction important enough to remember in detail at all. Orlok’s nerves were still getting the best of him as he motioned for Hutter to follow him into the shadows of his castle.

In an attempt of great hospitality, Hutter was presented with a grand meal while they got straight to work on the papers that would need to be put into order. Fine meats, grapes, and large loaves of bread were displayed on fine china, all placed for Hutter’s consumption while Count Orlok looked over the response letter Knock had written him at what must have been a week or two after Hutter was sent out. Too consumed with the thought of finally having someone, anyone, to share company with, Orlok had been neglecting the letter until now.  
Entranced by the letter of his long-distance companion, Orlok was rather startled out of his reading by the skeleton clock that stood near the far wall. He looked up at the time as his favourite clock in the house announced that it had reached midnight.  
Orlok was not the only one startled by the creepy clock. Hutter had been caught off guard by the announcement of the time as well, and in his fast move to turn, didn’t realize he had cut his finger on the bread knife until blood was already beginning to drip. Before Hutter could suck the blood off and move on with the meal, the Count stopped him. He stood, entranced by the smell of fresh human blood, and carefully approached.  
“You’ve hurt yourself. The precious blood!” Orlok went to grab Hutter’s hand, to take the blood that had already been spilled himself, but his forwardness was more than just a little too forward between two men who had only met a few hours ago. Between two men when one was unaware the other sustained himself on the blood of the living.  
Hutter pulled his hand away, clutching it close to his chest. He stepped back from the vampire, his eyes wide. Orlok took a step, enamoured still by the scent and sight of blood. By the next step, or perhaps the step after, he realized exactly the context in which he was acting.  
Near the foyer chairs, Hutter stopped, and Orlok took it as an invitation to continue his approach, though he tried to take it in a different light this time.  
“Can we not stay together a little while longer, my lovely man?” Orlok asked, looking up at Hutter, for Hutter was standing on the step above him. “It’s still quite a long time until sunrise and I sleep by day, dear fellow,” Orlok paused, or more so he hesitated before adding in a quieter, almost sorrowful voice, “completely dead to the world.” The Count ended his plea with a bow, gesturing to the chairs at the top of the small stair set. Hutter took a step back, staring at the bowing Count. Perhaps it was the flattery, or perhaps it was that Hutter had enjoyed the Count’s homely though awkwardly quiet company before the whole blood ordeal, but he was considering obliging the Count and remaining. He took another step back, and another, until the seat of the chair bumped against the back of his calf. Encouraged, the Count motioned for him to sit, and Hutter did so.  
Orlok couldn’t have been happier in that moment, though Hutter was still weary of the man. Not wanting to scare off his guest, the Count took the steps slowly, as if he were approaching a frightened animal. He sat in the chair facing Hutter’s, and the two spent the rest of the night in idle conversation.  
Not all of what was spoken of was remembered, for the two men had conversed until near dawn, and one can say a great many things in such long hours. However, at some point during their time together, Hutter tipped his head back and allowed the Count to feed, if briefly, from his neck. A lapse in poor judgement on Hutter’s part, perhaps, drunk off the night, but it ended up leading Orlok to believe the men were closer than they actually were. That belief, that desperate desire for any sort of relation with another person, would come back to haunt the vampire in the near future.

Hutter awoke the next morning in the same chair he surely must have fallen asleep in late in the night. Still a bit groggy, he stretched much like one would do if they had the intention of going back to sleep. Looking out into the foyer, he could see what remained of last night’s late meal. The memory of it all brought a smile to his face, and Hutter stood to attempt to wake up. It took a moment for the realization to hit him. He let the vampire feed from him. He let the vampire bite.  
He grabbed a compact mirror from his saddle bag, and pulled down his collar to examine his neck, checking both for a mark and to see if his recollection was correct. Sure enough, just below his Adam’s apple sat two red dots with the same width apart as Count Orlok’s front teeth. Truly, the teeth should’ve given the Count away, but Hutter in his excitement and determination about fulfilling this job, brushed it off as nothing of importance. That, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to care, for he, despite the frequent silence, had begun to enjoy the Count’s company from the very beginning.  
Hutter couldn’t help but smile at the marks on his neck. It almost made him feel of a greater importance. He had been bitten by a vampire. Until the reality set in. He had been bitten by vampire, and he didn’t know what precisely that entailed. Would the marks go away, like any others? Or would the marks be there, and would Hutter be sentenced to wearing scarves and higher collars for the rest of his days?  
He set the compact mirror back into his bag, and when he stood he gave another yawn, sleep still trying to drag him back. Out of the corner of his eye, something on the table caught Hutter’s attention. He couldn’t believe it, but laid out before him was a breakfast feast fit for a king. Breads, salted meats, grapes, cakes, and bottles of wine, all set out on the table waiting for him. He stared for a moment in disbelief before he walked over, took a seat, and had his fill.  
While he ate, he tried to think more of what he should do about the whole marks ordeal, if it was to become an ordeal at all. His focus wavered from planning to the food before him back to planning, and he came to the conclusion that he would locate the Count and ask him himself. That was how Hutter found himself roaming first the dining room, and then out to the castle yard in search for the Count, having forgotten one crucial detail about the vampire’s habits: he sleeps during the daytime.  
While his search was coming up fruitless, Hutter did stumble upon a stone gazebo overlooking the forests below the pass. The view was worth stopping a moment for, and it was in the gazebo that he had the idea of writing to his wife back home something that would explain the marks if they were to stay.  
From his overcoat, Hutter pulled a long piece of parchment paper and a pen from an inner pocket, and he began his letter in the sincerest way he could imagine.  
_My darling! Dearest!_  
Do not be troubled that your beloved is far away.  
As he wrote, mosquitoes decided to feast on the immobile being. Pausing his letter to swat them away, it was the very annoying insects that were bugging him that gave him the idea for what could possibly explain the odd marks. He grinned, though to himself, and went back to his letter.  
_The mosquitoes are a terrible nuisance. Two just bit me on the neck, side by side, quite close together._  
He paused again, wondering for a moment if that would truly be a believable tale. Without realizing it, his hand when to his neck, just over the marks. He smiled to himself, thinking of his newfound friend. He didn’t mean to, but the fond thoughts bled into his letter.  
_One dreams deeply in this desolate castle, but don’t let that frighten you._  
He signed the letter as he always did, with a wish to her health and a reaffirmation of their marriage vows. Satisfied with his letter, he ran off to the castle gate in the hopes of catching a post carrier. With some luck, he was just in time to send his letter off with a horseman who had taken some coercing to get so near to the castle.

That night, after Count Orlok had awoken, he and Hutter were back at the dining room table, getting to work on the search for new residency. Papers were everywhere, and Orlok sifted through them in a rather haphazard manner, looking at house after house that Hutter was able to present him. Though there were no true photographs, all drawn sketches that had been made by the real estate company during the first year of business. He set down the newest sketch, and though the house did look nice, he looked up at Hutter as if to ask if he had anything else to show him.  
Hutter met the vampire’s eyes for a moment, and then rummaged through his bag in haste. There was one last house to show, and Hutter pulled it from his bag without care. Due to that lack of care, and how tightly packed his bag had been, a couple other items were pulled from the bag, including the framed photograph of his wife.  
The gleam of the frame caught Orlok’s eyes as Hutter laid out the sketch of the final house. The vampire scooped up the photograph, looking at Hutter’s wife, Ellen, with almost analytical eyes. After a moment, he turned to look at Hutter, as if asking for an explanation. As if to ask, who is this woman? Hutter met the Count’s eyes, and then looked down, bowing his head in shame. Orlok turned back to the photograph. This woman, she had to have some importance to the real estate agent. To the man. To Hutter. She was quite beautiful, and at this point it would be rude not to compliment. So, in a clever guess, the Count took a shot at who this woman might be.  
“Your wife has a lovely neck,” he said, and handed back the photograph to Hutter. Hutter, looking as if he had seen a ghost, put the photograph into the inner pocket of his overcoat. The Count gave the man what he hoped to be a warm, non-threatening smile. “I’m buying the house,” he said as he grabbed the sketch and a pen to sign the form at the bottom of the paper. “That nice, deserted house across from yours.”  
He signed the paper as Hutter just stared at him. When he moved back, Hutter gathered the paper in more of a rush than it had been pulled out with. The Count frowned, concerned that he had overstepped a line again. Was it the compliment to the man’s wife? Was it too much to live so close to his newfound friend? His expression stayed rather sullen as Hutter gathered the papers, worried that he had truly lost what sense of gentlemanship he had been raised in before his afterlife. He hadn’t meant anything of the comment, truly, her neck was what he noticed first, and he had told no lie, but he meant nothing more than compliment from his words. He had no intention of taking from Hutter’s wife, taking from Ellen, when Hutter had so willing given to him.  
He only watched, silently, as Hutter left the table and headed in the direction of his living quarters.

Count Orlok hadn’t realized how long he had been at the table alone until the skeleton clock was chiming midnight once again. He stood, and looked down the hall to Hutter’s room. He watched as the door opened, as Hutter’s wide eyes peered at him through the crack of the open door, as the door was shut with harsh haste. Something about the air of the castle had changed.  
He went to check on Hutter, to make sure the man was alright. To make sure he hadn’t frightened him. As he approached, the door swung open on its own, as all the doors in the castle did for the vampire. He heard a sharp inhale, and watched, as he walked into the room, as Hutter hid himself under the comforter of the bed. The Count could feel his heart break. The man he thought he had befriended was cowering from him, as if he were some kind of monster. Just like the villagers would, when Orlok would visit the neighboring towns.  
“You know I won’t hurt you, right?” The Count tried to speak as gently as he could, but as he stepped closer, he watched as Hutter seemed to move deeper beneath the comforter. “Hutter? Please don’t be afraid. I’m only a vampire, I’m not a monster.”  
“You are the Nosferatu,” Hutter exclaimed, peeking out from his hiding place in a lapse of self-control. Count Orlok could feel his heart breaking into even smaller fragments. The Nosferatu, a blood-drinking demon, that was what Hutter thought he was? His blood was boiling. Hutter was no different than the villagers!  
The Count glared at the man, his whole demeanour changed. Hutter gasped, and clasped his hands in prayer, hoping that God would protect him from the vampire. In a fit of rage, Count Orlok raised his taloned hands to strike Hutter down where he lay. Before he could make the killing blow, a voice that only he seemed to be able to hear cut through the air, through his very being. The shrill cry of Hutter’s name, from somewhere far away and from someone with such a power that their voice had carried such distance, had stopped the Count in his tracks.  
He stepped away from Hutter, fearing whatever was protecting him. Fearing whatever already had claim on him. He turned around, terrified that the being, whoever it was, was actually standing behind him. The space behind the vampire was empty, and he walked out, not wanting to find out what would happen if he provoked the being further. Unknown to him, but it had been Ellen who had protected Hutter with solely the power of her voice.  
The Count didn’t find sleep easy, pacing the ground beside his coffin bed for several hours before it became too close to dawn for him to be outside his homeland dirt any longer. He felt nothing but betrayal. He had thought Hutter was different, that Hutter cared, that Hutter didn’t believe the fictitious tales the villagers would speak of and the falsities they would print in their books. He had thought Hutter, an outsider of these lands, would have been more understanding, but instead Hutter thought the Count was a monster.  
Count Orlok fell asleep to the thought of maybe, perhaps, a monster really had been all he was to be.  
He awoke to a fright. The lid of his coffin bed was gone, knocked onto the ground. He knew it had to have been Hutter, for if a villager had made the trip up so far, it would have been to kill him. Here he was, still alive, and still hurt from Hutter’s words. If he wanted the Nosferatu, he would get the Nosferatu.  
That evening, the Count loaded up five lidded troughs of his homeland’s dirt onto a cart, adding a sixth one to the top of the stack with just enough room inside for himself to travel during day and night safely.  
He traveled day and night, distances far, until he reached a port that would sail him to Wisborg. Part of the way had been down a river, but he was cargo during this trip, and cargo with a destination had to be delivered, however strange that cargo may be.  
The Empusa, a double-masted schooner with a hearty crew, would be the one to bring Count Orlok and his coffins of dirt to Wisborg in the end. With official papers he was able to muster up, the Count was on route to leave the Port of Varna.

In an insane asylum in Wisborg sat Knock, the time spent away from his vampiric companion having finally gone to his head.  
“Blood is life! Blood is life!” he would proclaim to all who would listen from the inside of his holding room, sometimes to no one at all, as he snatches flies and insects from the air and consumed them. On one such occasion that he had an audience of two, only a day after his admission, he attacked the director and head doctor of the asylum, going for the man’s neck as he knew Count Orlok would do to his own life sources.  
Some weeks into his containment, Knock had gotten ahold of a newspaper that told of the spread of a plague. The descriptions of wounds, of strange ones upon the necks of the victims, Knock knew it was Count Orlok. The article told of the plagues origins in Transylvania, and how it had reached two ports. The Count was coming, and Knock howled with laughter from his containment room.

Though the plague of rats was beginning to infect the sailors of the Empusa, the Count had yet to be discovered. Well, had yet to be discovered by the rest of the crew. There was one man, who slept in the downstairs hull of the ship when he was not wracked with visions from fever, who had seen Count Orlok a few times since setting sail. The man would cower in fear when Orlok showed himself, though the vampire was numb to it after what had happened at his castle in Transylvania. If all these people were going to see him as was a monster, then that's all they would receive.  
That steady, near complete isolation wasn’t to last though, as the feverish man soon infected the rest of the crew. Count Orlok, watching from the shadows of the cargo hold at night, still felt pity for the men who had gotten sick. They had Death’s touch, the plague, and none would return from that. In an act of mercy, and an act of gluttony, Orlok drained the men of their blood one by one, a few days after they were too sick to work, so that they died in minutes instead of agonizing days once the sickness truly settled in their cores.  
It was when all who remained were the captain and the first mate that the Count was discovered. It was the first mate who found the vampire, when he went down into the cargo hold to hunt for the rats that had surely brought about this curse. He found the rodents skittering inside one of the dirt-filled coffins, the lid had a hole in it that the rats must’ve chewed through. The sailor swung his axe at the rats, trying to kill the infestation. The coffin was damaged further, and the sound of it alerted the hiding Count. Fearing the worst, the Count flung open the lid to the coffin he was hiding inside, and rose from the wooden container to ensure he would reach his destination. The first mate screamed and fled at the sight of the vampire, running up to the main deck to get as far away from the stowaway as possible. Whether he feared infection or not, the first mate jumped overboard, ignoring the call of his captain as he launched himself down to the waves.  
Count Orlok made his way onto the main deck, both to try to find the frightened first mate and to see if he was, to his knowledge, otherwise alone on the ship. While he didn’t locate the first mate, he found the captain of the ship tied to the wheel helm, determined to keep control of his ship until Death took him from the waves. Death, it would seem, was already searching for the captain, as he ended up dying in Orlok’s arms with the vampire’s fangs in his neck.  
The Count steered the ship all by his lonesome for the rest of the journey to Wisborg, spurring the ship onto supernatural speeds much like he had 

When the ship pulled into the port, all who disembarked were shadows and the vampire, sneaking away into the night with a coffin filled with dirt in his arms. He traveled through the town like this, careful not to be seen as he made his way to the abandoned home across the way from Hutter’s. It was, after all, his home now. He had signed the paperwork.  
He crossed the waterway, and as he saw the house in person, the first thing he noticed was how empty the yard was. Some shrubberies lining the outer yard would be a nice touch once the place was cleaned up.  
As the vampire set up his new home, the town of Wisborg entered a plague panic when the cause of the crew’s disappearance was discovered in the captain’s log. Knock, having recently escaped, was taken up as a scapegoat of the town, and hunted by a mob. Orlok bore witness to this from his upstairs window. He stood there in shock as the man who still was loyal to him was being hunted down just as villagers had once hunted him.  
If it’s a monster they want, it’s a monster they’ll get.  
The pull of Ellen’s power drew his attention, though. His rage was momentarily forgotten as she moved to open her window. To let him in. To welcome the vampire as her husband once welcomed him.  
The window was opened, and the Count was entranced by the potential for connection. For understanding. For a kind touch instead of a hateful shriek. And yet, as he left his home and his shadow crept into Ellen’s room to ensure it was safe to show, he could feel within the clasp of his hand the fear that Ellen held in her heart. Despite this fear, Ellen still welcomed the vampire in. She still kept the window open. Count Orlok found himself at her bedside, drinking from her neck, when all he wanted was a friend. When all he wanted was someone to tell him he wasn’t a monster.  
In the end, it was merely a trap that he had fallen into. By the time he was able to pull himself away, it was past dawn. Roosters crowed, and reality sunk in. The Count got up to run, to go back to his coffin before it was too late, but it was too late. The sun was out, and in the sunlight, Count Orlok perished. As he disappeared into smoke and ash, the last thing he felt was the heartache of betrayal after betrayal that was ever so prevalent in his undead life.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow I still can't believe my professor let me write this for class! I wrote this over the course of four days (don't procrastinate, please don't) in March, and kind of forgot about it until now. This is crack to an extent, but then not crack to another extent. I did a whole research project surrounding the history of Nosferatu (1921) and that definitely influenced this.  
> Thank you for reading! This was honestly really fun to write, but I did not expect or intend for it to be so long. Oops lol
> 
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